Asia Financial Regulatory update - May 2026

Last month, regulators in Hong Kong and Singapore continued to advance their respective regulatory agendas across fintech, capital markets and digital assets, with the regulatory treatment of crypto-related products being a continued focus of the regulators.

This monthly bulletin provides a snapshot of the most important regulatory changes in Singapore and Hong Kong. To receive a more detailed list of regulatory developments, please sign up to our monthly newsletter below.

Key developments: 

Hong Kong SAR: 

• The SFC now permits secondary trading of tokenised SFC-authorised investment products by retail investors in Hong Kong, with trading to be conducted exclusively via on-platform auto-matching on SFC-licensed virtual asset trading platforms (VATPs).

• The HKMA has published examples of good practices on operational resilience for banks, covering ICT risk management, cyber security risk management, third-party dependency risk management and business continuity planning, testing and incident management.

Singapore:

• MAS has published its response to feedback on proposed amendments to the Securities and Futures Act 2001, intended to facilitate dual listings on the Singapore Exchange (SGX), and introduced the Securities and Futures (Amendment) Bill 2026 to enable the proposed regulatory regime.

• MAS has published a consultation paper proposing a more risk-sensitive prudential treatment for cryptoassets issued on permissionless blockchains, which would allow banks to classify and treat permissionless cryptoassets as Group 1 cryptoassets subject to principle-based requirements.